The Mary Snell Exorcism

In the late spring of 1973, Anglican clergy in Birmingham, England, conducted a deliverance ritual on a twenty-six-year-old factory worker whose case has come down to history under the name Mary Snell. The events have never been fully documented in any single published account. What is known derives from interviews collected by the journalist Peter Hounam in the months leading up to the much more public Michael Taylor exorcism in Ossett in 1974, a subsequent statement issued by the Bishop of Birmingham’s office, and the personal papers of one of the participating clergymen, deposited in the Lambeth Palace Library.

Background

The Church of England in the early 1970s was in the middle of a quiet but consequential reform of its approach to deliverance ministry. Following the report of the Exeter Commission on Exorcism in 1972, dioceses across England had begun appointing trained advisers in deliverance, charged with screening applicants and discouraging amateur efforts. Birmingham was among the first dioceses to follow this guidance. When Mary Snell’s family approached the cathedral in March 1973, the standard protocol was applied: medical evaluation first, pastoral conversation second, ritual prayer only as a last resort and only with the bishop’s specific approval.

Mary worked on the assembly line at a small components factory in the Aston district. By her family’s account she had been a quiet, churchgoing young woman until the previous autumn, when she had begun complaining of a presence she could not see but felt watching her in her bedroom and in the corridors of the factory at night. Her behavior changed slowly. She lost weight. She refused to attend Sunday services. She was found one morning in November 1972 sitting in the kitchen with all the chairs in the room arranged in a circle around her, unable to remember how they had got there.

The Manifestations

The phenomena reported by family members and the parish priest involved no spectacular displays. There were no levitations, no spoken Latin, none of the cinematic features that had begun to dominate public imagination in the year following William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Instead the case was characterized by what the Birmingham deliverance adviser called, in his report, “a slow weight.” Mary spoke less and less. When she did speak, family members described her voice as flat and exhausted, and her vocabulary diminished to short, often despairing phrases. She would sometimes fall into prolonged states of immobility, sitting for two or three hours staring at a fixed point on the wall. On three occasions, witnesses reported the room temperature dropping sharply during these episodes, though no instrumental measurements were taken at the time.

A consultant psychiatrist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital examined her in February 1973 and diagnosed severe depression with dissociative features. He recommended admission to the psychiatric ward. The family declined and continued to seek pastoral help.

The Deliverance

The ritual itself was conducted on the evening of May 18, 1973, in Mary’s parents’ home. Three Anglican priests were present, along with a deacon, a parish nurse, and Mary’s parents. The form used was the deliverance prayer drawn from the 1972 commission’s recommendations, simpler and more pastoral than the Roman Catholic rite. It included readings from Mark’s Gospel, prayers of binding and renunciation, and the laying on of hands. The session lasted approximately ninety minutes. According to the surviving notes, Mary wept quietly during much of it, spoke only to give her own renunciations as the rite required, and at one point fell into a deep sleep from which she had to be gently woken.

She was followed up over the next six months by a parish counsellor and continued under psychiatric care. Reports indicate she returned to work in the autumn of 1973 and remained well, though she never returned to the same factory.

Skeptical Analysis

The Mary Snell case is significant precisely because of how undramatic it was. The Anglican advisers who handled it explicitly rejected the model of full demonic possession and instead spoke of “spiritual oppression,” a category they used to describe states in which a person seems weighed down by something beyond their ordinary psychology but in which the personality itself remains intact. Modern clinicians reading the surviving notes have suggested that Mary’s symptoms map closely onto severe depression with possible dissociative episodes, perhaps complicated by the religious framework her family used to understand her experience. The temperature drops, never instrumentally verified, may be artifacts of memory or expectation.

What the case does illustrate, regardless of its underlying cause, is the contrast between the disciplined, medically informed Anglican approach taken in Birmingham and the more sensational practices that would shortly produce catastrophic results in Ossett. Peter Hounam, who reported on both, would draw the comparison explicitly. The legacy of Mary Snell within deliverance ministry has been quiet but durable: she is among the first British cases on record in which a formal exorcism was preceded by a psychiatric evaluation, a consultation with the family, and a structured pastoral plan for what would follow.

Aftermath

Mary Snell, under her real name, gave one interview anonymously to a religious magazine in 1976, in which she said only that she did not know whether what had been with her was a devil or her own mind, but that she had been quietly grateful, ever since, that the priests had treated her like a person rather than a case. She is believed to have died in the early 2000s.

Sources

• Hounam, Peter, and Andrew Hogg. Secret Cult. Lion Publishing, 1985.
• Lambeth Palace Library, Personal Papers of Canon J. R. Pearce, MS 4421.
• Perry, Michael, ed. Deliverance: Psychic Disturbances and Occult Involvement. SPCK, 1987.